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Title: Lord Kitchener
Author: G. K. Chesterton
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LORD KITCHENER

Horatio Herbert Kitchener was Irish by
birth but English by extraction, being born in
County Kerry, the son of an English colonel. The
fanciful might see in this first and accidental fact
the presence of this simple and practical man
amid the more mystical western problems and
dreams which were very distant from his mind, an
element which clings to all his career and gives it an
unconscious poetry. He had many qualities of the
epic hero, and especially this—that he was the last
man in the world to be the epic poet. There is
something almost provocative to superstition in the
way in which he stands at every turn as the symbol
of the special trials and the modern transfiguration
of England; from this moment when he was born
among the peasants of Ireland to the moment
when he died upon the sea, seeking at the other end
of the world the other great peasant civilisation of
Russia. Yet at each of these symbolic moments
he is, if not as unconscious as a symbol, then as
silent as a symbol; he is speechless and supremely
significant, like an ensign or a flag. The superficial
picturesqueness of his life, at least, lies very much
in this—that he was like a hero condemned by fate
to act an allegory.[2]

We find this, for instance, in one of the very first
and perhaps one of the most picturesque of all the
facts that are recorded or reported of him. As a
youth, tall, very shy and quiet, he was only notable
for intellectual interests of the soberest and most
methodical sort, especially for the close study of
mathematics. This also, incidentally, was typical
enough, for his work in Egypt and the Soudan, by
which his fame was established, was based wholly
upon such calculations. It was not merely
mathematical but literally geometrical. His work
bore the same relation to Gordon's that a rigid
mathematical diagram bears to a rough pencil
sketch on which it is based. Yet the student thus
bent on the strictest side of his profession, studying
it at Woolwich and entering the Engineers as the
most severely scientific branch of the army, had as
a first experience of war something so romantic that
it has been counted incredible, yet something so
relevant to the great reality of to-day that it might
have been made up centuries after his death, as a
myth is made up about a god. He happened to be
in France in the most tragic hour that France has
ever known or, please God, will ever know. She
was bearing alone the weight of that alien tyranny,
of that hopeless and almost lifeless violence, which
the other nations have since found to be the worst of
all the terrors which God tolerates in this world. She
trod that winepress alone; and of the peoples there
were none to help her. In 1870 the Prussian had
already encircled Paris, and General Chanzy was
fighting against enormous odds to push northwards[3]
to its relief, when his army was joined by the young
and silent traveller from England. All that was in
Kitchener's mind or motives will perhaps never be
known. France was still something of an ideal of
civilisation for many of the more generous English
gentry. Prussia was never really an ideal for anybody,
even the Prussians, and mere success, which could
not make her an ideal, had not yet calamitously made
her a model. There was in it also, no doubt, a
touch of the schoolboy who runs away to sea—that
touch of the schoolboy without the sense of
which the staidest Englishman will always be
inexplicable. But considered historically there is
something strangely moving about the incident—the
fact that Kitchener was a French soldier almost
before he was an English one. As Hannibal was
dedicated in boyhood to war against the eagles of
Rome, Kitchener was dedicated, almost in boyhood,
to war against the eagles of Germany. Romance
came to this realist, whether by impulse or by
accident, like a wind from without, as first love
will come to the woman-hater. He was already,
both by fate and choice, something more than he
had meant to be. The mathematician, we might
almost say the calculating boy, was already gambling
in the highest lottery which led to the highest
and most historic loss. The engineer devoted to
discipline was already a free lance, because already
a knight-errant.

He returned to England to continue his comparatively
humdrum order of advancement; and the
next call that came to him was of a strangely[4]
different and yet also of a strangely significant kind.
The Palestine Exploration Fund sent him with
another officer to conduct topographical and antiquarian
investigations in a country where practical
exertions are always relieved against a curiously
incongruous background—as if they were setting up
telegraph-posts through the Garden of Eden or
opening a railway station at the New Jerusalem.
But the contrast between antiquity and modernity
was not the only one; there was still the sort of
contrast that can be a collision. Kitchener was
almost immediately to come in contact with what
was to be, in various aspects, the problem of his
life—the modern fanaticisms of the Near East.
There is an English proverb which asks whether
the mountain goes to Mahomet or he to the
mountain, and it may be a question whether his
religion be the cause or the effect of a certain
spirit, vivid and yet strangely negative, which dwells
in such deserts. Walking among the olives of Gaza
or looking on the Philistine plain, such travellers
may well feel that they are treading on cold
volcanoes, as empty as the mountains of the moon.
But the mountain of Mahomet is not yet an extinct
volcano.

Kitchener, in these first days of seemingly mild
and minute duties, was early aware of it. At Safed,
in the Galilean hills, his small party had found
itself surrounded by an Arab mob, stricken suddenly
mad with emotions unintelligible to the political
mobs of the West. He was himself wounded,
but, defending himself as best he could with a[5]
walking-stick, not only saved his own life but that
of his fellow-officer, Lieutenant Conder, who had
been beaten to the earth with an Arab club. He
continued his work indeed with prosaic pertinacity,
and developed in the survey of the Holy Land all
that almost secretive enthusiasm for detail which
lasted all his life. Of the most famous English
guide-book he made the characteristic remark,
“Where Murray has seven names I have a hundred
and sixteen.” Most men, in speaking or writing of
such a thing, would certainly have said “a hundred.”
It is characteristic of his type that he did not even
think in round numbers. But there was in him,
parallel to this almost arithmetical passion, another
quality which is, in a double sense, the secret of his
life. For it was the cause of at least half his
success; and yet he very successfully concealed it—especially
from his admirers.

The paradox of all this part of his life lies in
this—that, destined as he was to be the greatest
enemy of Mahomedanism, he was quite exceptionally
a friend of Mahomedans. He had been first received
in that land, so to speak, with a blow on the head
with a club; he was destined to break the sword of
the last Arab conqueror, to wreck his holy city and
treat all the religious traditions of it with a deliberate
desecration which has often been held oppressive
and was undoubtedly ruthless. Yet with the individual
Moslem he had a sort of natural brotherhood
which has never been explained. Had it been shown
by a soldier of the Crusades, it would have been
called witchcraft. In this, as in many other cases,[6]
the advance of a larger enlightenment prevents us
from calling it anything. There was mixed with it,
no doubt, the deep Moslem admiration for mere
masculinity, which has probably by its exaggeration
permitted the Moslem subordination of women.
But Kitchener (who was himself accused, rightly
or wrongly, of a disdain for women) must have
himself contributed some other element to the
strangest of international sympathies. Whatever
it was, it must be constantly kept in mind as
running parallel to his scientific industry and
particularity; for it was these two powers, used
systematically for many years before the event, that
prepared the ground for the overthrow of that wild
papacy and wandering empire which so long hung
in the desert, like a mirage to mislead and to
destroy.

Kitchener was called away in 1878 to similar
surveying duties in Cyprus, and afterwards in
Anatolia, where the same faculty obtained him a
firman, making him safe in all the Holy Cities
of Islam. He also dealt much with the Turkish
fugitives fleeing from the Russian guns to Erzerum—whither,
so long after, the guns were to follow.
But it is with his later summons to Egypt that
we feel he has returned to the theatre of the great
things of his life. It is not necessary in this rough
sketch to discuss the rights and wrongs or the
general international origin of the British occupation
of Egypt; the degree of praise or blame to be
given to the Khedive, who was the nominal ruler,
or to Arabi, the Nationalist leader, who for a time[7]
seized the chief power in his place. Kitchener's
services in the operations by which Arabi was
defeated were confined to some reconnaissance
work immediately preceding the bombardment of
Alexandria; and the problem with which his own
personality became identified was not that of the
Government of Egypt, but of the more barbaric
power beyond, by which Egypt, and any powers
ruling it, came to be increasingly imperilled. And
what advanced him rapidly to posts of real responsibility
in the new politics of the country was the
knowledge he already had of wilder men and more
mysterious forces than could be found in Egyptian
courts or even Egyptian camps. It was the combination,
of which we have already spoken, of detailed
experience and almost eccentric sympathy. In
practice it was his knowledge of Arabic, and still
more his knowledge of Arabs.

There is in Islam a paradox which is perhaps a
permanent menace. The great creed born in the
desert creates a kind of ecstasy out of the very
emptiness of its own land, and even, one may say,
out of the emptiness of its own theology. It affirms,
with no little sublimity, something that is not merely
the singleness but rather the solitude of God.
There is the same extreme simplification in the
solitary figure of the Prophet; and yet this isolation
perpetually reacts into its own opposite. A void
is made in the heart of Islam which has to be
filled up again and again by a mere repetition of the
revolution that founded it. There are no sacraments;
the only thing that can happen is a sort of apocalypse,[8]
as unique as the end of the world; so the
apocalypse can only be repeated and the world
end again and again. There are no priests; and yet
this equality can only breed a multitude of lawless
prophets almost as numerous as priests. The very
dogma that there is only one Mahomet produces an
endless procession of Mahomets. Of these the
mightiest in modern times were the man whose
name was Ahmed, and whose more famous title
was the Mahdi; and his more ferocious successor
Abdullahi, who was generally known as the Khalifa.
These great fanatics, or great creators of fanaticism,
succeeded in making a militarism almost as famous
and formidable as that of the Turkish Empire on
whose frontiers it hovered, and in spreading a reign
of terror such as can seldom be organised except
by civilisation. With Napoleonic suddenness and
success the Mahdist hordes had fallen on the army
of Hicks Pasha, when it left its camp at Omdurman,
on the Nile opposite Khartoum, and had cut it to
pieces in a fashion incredible. They had established
at Omdurman their Holy City, the Rome of their
nomadic Roman Empire. Towards that terrible
place many adventurous men, like poor Hicks, had
gone and were destined to go. The sands that
encircled it were like that entrance to the lion's
cavern in the fable, towards which many footprints
pointed, and from which none returned.

The last of these was Gordon, that romantic and
even eccentric figure of whom so much might be
said. Perhaps the most essential thing to say of
him here is that fortune once again played the artist[9]
in sending such a man, at once as the leader and
the herald of a man like Kitchener; to show the
way and to make the occasion; to be a sacrifice
and a signal for vengeance. Whatever else there
was about Gordon, there was about him the air not
only of a hero, but of the hero of a tragedy. Something
Oriental in his own mysticism, something
most of his countrymen would have called moonshine,
something perverse in his courage, something
childish and beautiful in that perversity, marked him
out as the man who walks to doom—the man who in
a hundred poems or fables goes up to a city to be
crucified. He had gone to Khartoum to arrange the
withdrawal of the troops from the Soudan, the Government
having decided, if possible, to live at peace with
the new Mahdist dictatorship; and he went through
the deserts almost as solitary as a bird, on a journey
as lonely as his end. He was cut off and besieged in
Khartoum by the Mahdist armies, and fell with the
falling city. Long before his end he had been
in touch with Kitchener, now of the Egyptian
Intelligence Department, and weaving very carefully
a vast net of diplomacy and strategy in which the
slayers of Gordon were to be taken at last.

A well-known English journalist, Bennet
Burleigh, wandering near Dongola, fell into conversation
with an Arab who spoke excellent English,
and who, with a hospitality highly improper in a
Moslem, produced two bottles of claret for his
entertainment. The name of this Arab was
Kitchener; and the two bottles were all he had.
The journalist obtained, along with the claret, his[10]
first glimpse of the great and extraordinary schemes
with which Kitchener was already working to
avenge the comrade who had fallen in Khartoum.
This part of the work was as personal as that of a
private detective plotting against a private murderer
in a modern detective story. Kitchener had learned
to speak the Arab tongue not only freely but
sociably. He wore the Arab dress and fell into the
Arab type of courtesy so effectively that even his
blue northern eyes did not betray him. Above all,
he sympathised with the Arab character; and in
a thousand places sprinkled over the map of
North-East Africa he made friends for himself and
therefore enemies for the Mahdi. This was the
first and superficially the most individual of
the converging plans which were to checkmate
the desert empire; and its effects were very far-reaching.
Again and again, in subsequent years,
when the missionaries of the Mahdist religion
pushed northward, they found themselves entangled
among tribes which the English power had not so
much conquered as converted. The legend of the
great Prophet encountered something more elusive
than laws or military plans; it encountered another
legend—an influence which also carried the echoes
of the voice of a man. The Ababdeh Arabs, it was
said, made a chain across the desert, which the new
and awful faith could not pass. The Mudir of
Dongola was on the point of joining the ever-victorious
Prophet of Omdurman. Kitchener, clad
as an Arab, went out almost alone to speak with
him. What passed, perhaps, we can never tell; but[11]
before his guest had even left him the Mudir flew
to arms, fell upon the Prophet's hosts at Korti, and
drove them before him.

The second and superficially more solid process
of preparation is much better known. It was the
education of the native Egyptian army. It is not
necessary to swallow all the natural jingoism of
English journalism in order to see something truly
historic about the English officer's work with the
Fellaheen, or native race of Egypt. For centuries
they had lain as level as the slime of the Nile, and
all the conquerors in the chronicles of men had
passed over them like a pavement. Though professing
the challenging creed of the Moslems, they
seem to have reached something like the pessimist
patience of the Hindoos. To have turned this slime
once more into a human river, to have lifted this
pavement once more into a human rampart or
barricade, is not a small thing, nor a thing that
could possibly be done even by mere power, still
less by mere money—and this Kitchener and his
English companions certainly did. There must have
been something much more than a mere cynical
severity in “organisation” in the man who did it.
There must be something more than a mere commercial
common-sense in the nation in whose name
it was done. It is easy enough, with sufficient
dulness and greed of detail, to “organise” anything
or anybody. It is easy enough to make people
obey a bugle (or a factory hooter) as the Prussian
soldiers obey a bugle. But it is no such trumpet
that makes possible the resurrection of the dead.[12]

The success of this second of the three
converging designs of Kitchener, the making of
a new Egyptian army, was soon seen in the
expedition against Dongola. It had been foreshadowed
in a successful defence of Suakin, in
which Kitchener was wounded; a defence against
Osman Digna, perhaps the first of the Mahdist
generals whose own strongholds were eventually
stormed at Gemaizeh; and in the victory at Toski,
where fell the great warrior Wad el Njume, whose
strategy had struck down both Hicks and Gordon.
But the turn of the tide was Dongola. In 1892
General, now Lord Grenfell, who had been Sirdar,
or Commander-in-Chief of the Egyptian Army, and
ordered the advance at Toski, retired and left his
post vacant. The great public servant known
latterly as Lord Cromer had long had his eye on
Kitchener and the part he had played, even as a
young lieutenant, in the new military formation of the
Fellaheen. He was now put at the head of the whole
new army; and the first work that fell to him was
leading the new expedition. In three days after the
order was received the force started at nightfall and
marched southward into the night. The detail is
something more than picturesque; for on all
accounts of that formidable attack on the Mahdi's
power a quality of darkness rests like a kind of cloud.
It was, for one thing, a surprise attack and a very
secret one, so that the cloud was as practical as a
cloak; but it was also the re-entrance of a territory
which an instinct has led the English to call the
Dark Continent even under its blazing noon. There[13]
vast distances alone made a veil like that of darkness,
and there the lives of Gordon and Hicks and
hundreds more had been swallowed up in an ancient
silence. Perhaps we cannot guess to-day, after
the colder completion of Kitchener's work,
what it meant for those who went on that
nocturnal march; who crept up in two lines, one
along the river and the other along an abandoned
railway track, moving through the black night; and
in the black night encamped, and waited for the
rising of the moon. Anyhow, the tale told of it
strikes this note, especially in one touch of what can
only be called a terrible triviality. I mean the
reference to the new noise heard just before day-break,
revealing the nearness of the enemy: the
dreadful drum of Islam, calling for prayer to an
awful God—a God not to be worshipped by the
changing and sometimes cheerful notes of harp or
organ, but only by the drum that maddens by
mere repetition.

But the third of Kitchener's lines of approach
remains to consider. The surprise attack, which
captured the riverside village of Firket, had eventually
led, in spite of storms that warred on the
advance like armies, and in one place practically
wiped out a brigade, to the fall of Dongola itself.
But Dongola was not the high place of the enemy;
it was not there that Gordon died or that Abdullahi
was still alive. Far away up the dark river were the
twin cities of the tragedy, the city of the murder and
the city of the murderer. It was in relation to this
fixed point of fact that Kitchener's next proceeding[14]
is seen to be supremely characteristic. He was so
anxious to do one thing that he was cautious about
doing it. He was more concerned to obtain a success
than to appear to deserve it; he did not want a
moral victory, but a mathematical certainty. So far
from following up the dash in the dark, upon Firket
or Dongola, with more romantic risks, he decided
not to advance on the Mahdi's host a minute faster
than men could follow him building a railway.
He created behind him a colossal causeway of
communications, going out alone into wastes where
there was and had been no other mortal trace
or track. The engineering genius of Girouard,
a Canadian, designed and developed it with
what was, considering the nature of the task,
brilliant rapidity; but by the standards of desert
warfare it must have seemed that Kitchener and his
English made war as slowly as grass grows or
orchards bear fruit. The horsemen of Araby, darting
to and fro like swallows, must have felt as if they
were menaced by the advance of a giant snail. But
it was a snail that left a shining track unknown to
those sands; for the first time since Rome decayed
something was being made there that could remain.
The effect of this growing road, one might almost
say this living road, began to be felt. Mahmoud,
the Mahdist military leader, fell back from Berber,
and gathered his hosts more closely round the
sacred city on the Nile. Kitchener, making another
night march up the Atbara river, stormed the Arab
camp and took Mahmoud prisoner. Then at last
he moved finally up the western bank of the Nile[15]
and came in sight of Omdurman. It is somewhat
of a disproportion to dwell on the fight that followed
and the fall of the great city. The fighting had
been done already, and more than half of it was
working; fighting a long fight against the centuries,
against ages of sloth and the great sleep of the
desert, where there had been nothing but visions,
and against a racial decline that men had accepted
as a doom. On the following Sunday a memorial
service for Charles Gordon was held in the place
where he was slain.

The fact that Kitchener fought with rails as much
as with guns rather fixed from this time forward the
fashionable view of his character. He was talked
of as if he were himself made of metal, with a head
filled not only with calculations but with clockwork.
This is symbolically true, in so far as it means that
he was by temper what he was by trade, an engineer.
He had conquered the Mahdi, where many had
failed to do so. But what he had chiefly conquered
was the desert—a great and greedy giant. He
brought Cairo to Khartoum; we might say that
he brought London or Liverpool with him to
the gates of the strange city of Omdurman. Some
parts of his action supported, even regrettably, the
reputation of rigidity. But if any admirer had, in
this hour of triumph, been staring at him as at a
stone sphinx of inflexible fate, that admirer would
have been very much puzzled by the next passage of
his life. Kitchener was something much more than
a machine; for in the mind, as much as in the body,
flexibility is far more masculine than inflexibility.[16]

A situation developed almost instantly after his
victory in which he was to show that he was a
diplomatist as well as a soldier. At Fashoda, a
little farther up the Nile, he found something more
surprising, and perhaps more romantic, than the
wildest dervish of the desert solitudes. A French
officer, and one of the most valiant and distinguished
of French officers, Major Marchand, had penetrated
to the place with the pertinacity of a great explorer,
and seemed prepared to hold it with all the unselfish
arrogance of a patriot. It is said that the
Frenchman not only welcomed Kitchener in the
name of France, but invited him, with courteous
irony, to partake of vegetables grown on the spot,
a symbol of stable occupation. The story, if it be
true, is admirably French; for it reveals at once
the wit and the peasant. But the humour of the
Englishman was worthily equal to the wit of the
Frenchman; and it was humour of that sane sort
which we call good humour. Political papers in
pacific England and France raved and ranted over
the crisis, responsible journals howled with jingoism;
but through it all, until the moment when the
French agreed to retire, the two most placable and
even sociable figures were the two grim tropical
travellers and soldiers who faced each other on the
burning sands of Fashoda. As we see them facing
each other, we have again the vague sense of a
sign or a parable which runs through this story.
For they were to meet again long afterwards as
allies, when both were leading their countrymen
against the great enemy in the Great War.[17]

Something of the same shadow of prophecy is
perhaps the deepest memory left by the last war
of Kitchener before the greatest. After further
activities in Egypt and the Soudan, of which the
attempt to educate the Fellaheen by the Gordon
Memorial College was the most remarkable, he was
abruptly summoned to South Africa to be the right
hand of Lord Roberts in the war then being waged
against the Boers. He conducted the opening of
the determining battle of Paardeberg, and was
typically systematic in covering the half-conquered
country with a system of block-houses and enclosures
like a diagram of geometry. But to-day, and for
many reasons, Englishmen will think first of the
last scene of that war. When Botha and the
Boer Generals surrendered to Kitchener, there
was the same goodwill among the soldiers to
contrast with the ill-will of the journalists. Botha
also became almost a friend; and Botha also
was to be in the far future an ally, smiting the
German in Africa as Kitchener smote him in Europe.
There was the same hint of prophecy about the war
that ended at Vereeniging as about that other war
that so nearly began at Fashoda. It seemed almost
as if God were pitting his heroes against each other
in tournament, before they all rode together against
the heathen pouring upon them out of Germany.

It is with that name of Germany that this mere
skeleton of the facts must end. After the South
African War Kitchener had been made Commander-in-Chief
in India, where he effected several vital
changes, notably the emancipation of that office[18]
from the veto of the Military Member of the
Council of the Viceroy, and where he showed once
more, in his dealings with the Sepoys, that
obscure yet powerful sympathy with the mysterious
intellect of the East. Thence he had been again
shifted to Egypt; but the next summons that came
to him swallowed up all these things. A short time
after war broke out with Germany he was made
Minister of War, and held that post until the dark
season when he set out on a mission to Russia, which
never reached its goal. But when his ship went
down he had already done a work and registered a
change in England, with some words about which
this sketch may well conclude. Journalistic attacks
were indeed made upon him, but in writing for a
foreign reader I pass them by. In such a place I
will not say even of the meanest of Englishmen what
they were not ashamed to say of one of the greatest.
In his new work he was not only a very great man,
but one dealing with very great things; and perhaps
his most historic moment was when he broke his
customary silence about the deeper emotions of life,
and became the mouthpiece of the national horror
at the German fashion of fighting, which he declared
to have left a stain upon the whole profession of arms.
For, by a movement unusually and unconsciously
dramatic, he chose that moment to salute across the
long stretch of years the comparative chivalry and
nobility of his dead enemies of the Soudan, and to
announce that in the heart of Europe, in learned
academies and ordered government offices, there
had appeared a lunacy so cruel and unclean that[19]
the maddest dervish dead in the desert had a right
to disdain it where he lay.

Kitchener, like other Englishmen of his type,
made his name outside England and even outside
Europe. But it was in England, and after his return
to England, that he did what will perhaps make his
name most permanent in history. That return to
England was indeed as symbolic as his last and tragic
journey to Russia. Both will stand as symbols of
the deepest things which are moving mankind in
the Great War. In truth the whole of that great
European movement which we call the cause of the
Allies is in itself a homeward journey. It is a return
to native and historic ideals, after an exile in
the howling wilderness of the political pessimism
and cynicism of Prussia. After his great adventures
in Africa and Asia, the Englishman has re-discovered
Europe; and in the very act of discovering Europe,
the Englishman has at last discovered England.
The revelation of the forces still really to be found
in England itself, when all is said that can possibly
or plausibly be said against English commercialism
and selfishness, was the last work of Lord Kitchener.
He was the embodiment of an enormous experience
which has passed through Imperialism and reached
patriotism. He had been the supreme figure of
that strange and sprawling England which lies
beyond England; which carries the habits of
English clubs and hotels into the solitudes of the
Nile or up the passes of the Himalayas, and is
infinitely ignorant of things infinitely nearer home.
For this type of Englishman Cairo was nearer than[20]
Calais. Yet the typical figure which we associated
with such places as Cairo was destined before he died
to open again the ancient gate of Calais and lead in a
new and noble fashion the return of England to
Europe. The great change for which his countrymen
will probably remember him longest was what
we should call in England the revolution of the New
Armies.

It is almost impossible to express how great a
revolution it was so as to convey its dimensions to
the citizens of any other great European country
where military service has long been the rule and
not the exception, where the people itself is only
the army in mufti. In its mere aspect to the eye it
was something like an invasion by a strange race.
The English professional soldier of our youth had been
conspicuous not only by his red coat but by his rarity.
When rare things become common they do not become
commonplace. The memory of their singularity is
still strong enough to give them rather the
appearance of a prodigy, as anyone can realise
by imagining an army of hunchbacks or a city of
one-eyed men. The English soldier had indeed
been respected as a patriotic symbol, but rather
as a priest or a prince can be a symbol, as being
the exception and not the rule. A child was taken
to see the soldier outside Buckingham Palace almost
as he was taken to see the King driving out of
Buckingham Palace. Hence the first effect of the
enlargement of the armies was something almost
like a fairy-tale—almost as if the streets were
crowded with kings, walking about and wearing[21]
crowns of gold. This merely optical vision of the
revolution was but the first impression of a reality
equally vast and new. The first levies which came
to be called popularly Kitchener's Army, because
of the energy and inspiration with which he set
himself to their organisation, consisted entirely of
volunteers. It was not till long after the whole
face of England had been transformed by this
mobilisation that the Government resorted to compulsion
to bring in a mere margin of men. Save
for the personality of Kitchener, the new militarism
of England came wholly and freely from the English.
While it was as universal as a tax, it was as spontaneous
as a riot. But it is obvious that to produce
so large and novel an effect out of the mere psychology
of a nation, apart from its organisation, was
something which required tact as well as decision:
and it is this which illustrated a side of the English
general's character without which he may be, and
indeed has been, wholly misunderstood.

It is of the nature of national heroes of Kitchener's
type that their admirers are unjust to them. They
would have been better appreciated if they had been
less praised. When a soldier is turned into an idol
there seems an unfortunate tendency to turn him
into a wooden idol, like the wooden figure of
Hindenburg erected by the ridiculous authorities
of Berlin. In a more moderate and metaphorical
sense there has been an unfortunate tendency to
represent Kitchener as strong by merely representing
him as stiff—to suggest that he was made
of wood and not of steel. There are two maxims,[22]
which have been, I believe, the mottoes of two
English families, both of which are boasts but each
the contrary of the other. The first runs, “You
can break me, but you cannot bend me”; and the
second, “You can bend me, but you cannot break
me.” With all respect to whoever may have borne
it, the first is the boast of the barbarian and therefore
of the Prussian; the second is the boast
of the Christian and the civilised man—that he is
free and flexible, yet always returns to his true
position, like a tempered sword. Now too much of
the eulogy on a man like Kitchener tended to
praise him not as a sword but as a poker.
He happened to rise into his first fame at a time
when much of the English Press and governing
class was still entirely duped by Germany, and to
some extent judged everything by a Bismarckian
test of blood and iron. It tended to neglect the
very real disadvantages, even in practical life, which
lie upon the man of blood and iron, as compared
with the man of blood and bone. It is one grave
disadvantage, for instance, that if a man made of
iron were to break his bones, they would not heal.
In other words, the Prussian Empire, with all its
perfections and efficiencies, has one notable defect—that
it is a dead thing. It does not draw its life
from any primary human religion or poetry; it does
not grow again from within. And being a dead
thing, it suffers also from having no nerves to give
warning or reaction; it reads no danger signals;
it has no premonitions; about its own spiritual
doom its sentinels are deaf and all its spies[23]
are blind. On the other hand, the British Empire,
with all its blunders and bad anomalies, to which I
am the last person to be blind, has one noticeable
advantage—that it is a living thing. It is not that
it makes no mistakes, but it knows it has made
them, as the living hand knows when it has touched
hot iron. That is exactly what a hand of iron would
not know; and that is exactly the error in the
German ideal of a hand of iron. No candid critic
of England can read its history fairly and fail to see
a certain flexibility and self-modification; illiberal
policies followed by liberal ones; men failing in
something and succeeding in something else; men
sent to do one thing and being wise enough to do
another; the human power of the living hand to
draw back. As it happens, Kitchener was extraordinarily
English in this lively and vital moderation.
And it is to be feared that the more German idealisation
of him, in the largely unenlightened England
before the war, has already done some harm to
his reputation, and in missing what was particularly
English has missed what was particularly
interesting.

Lord Kitchener was personally a somewhat silent
man; and his social conventions were those of the
ordinary English officer, especially the officer who
has lived among Orientals—conventions which in
any case tend in the direction of silence. He also
really had, and to an extent of which some people
complained, a certain English embarrassment about
making all his purposes clear, especially before
they were clear to himself. He probably liked to[24]
think a thing out in his own way and therefore at
his own time, which was not always the time at
which people thought they had a right to question
him. In this way it is true of him, as of such
another strong man as the Irish patriot Parnell, that
his very simplicity had an effect of secrecy. But it is
a complete error about him, as it was a complete error
about Parnell, to suppose that he took the Prussian
pose of disdaining and disregarding everybody;
that he settled everything in solitary egoism; that he
was a Superman too self-sufficing to listen to friends
and too philosophical to listen to reason. It will be
noted that every crisis of his life that is lit up by
history contradicts the colours of this picture. He
could not only take counsel with his friends, but he
was abnormally successful in taking counsel with
his foes. It is notable that whenever he came in
personal contact with a great captain actually or
potentially in arms against him, the result was not a
mere collision but a mutual comprehension. He
established the friendliest relations with the chivalrous
and adventurous Marchand, standing on the deadly
debatable land of Fashoda. He established equally
friendly relations with the Boer generals, gathered
under the dark cloud of national disappointment
and defeat. In all such instances, so far as
his individuality could count, it is clear that
he acted as a moderate and, in the universal
sense, as a liberal. The results and the records
of those who met him in such hours are quite
sufficient to prove that he did not leave the
impression of a Prussian arrogance. If he was silent,[25]
his silence must have been more friendly, I had
almost said more convivial, than many men's
conversation. But on the larger platform of the
European War, this quiet but unique gift of open-mindedness
and intellectual hospitality was destined
to do two very decisive things, which may profoundly
affect history. In the first he dealt with the more
democratic and even revolutionary elements in
England; and in the second he represents a very
real change that has passed over the English
traditions about Russia.

Personally, as has already been noted, Lord
Kitchener never was and never pretended to be anything
more or less than the good military man, and by
the time of the Great War he was already an elderly
military man. The type has much the same standards
and traditions in all European countries; but in
England it is, if anything, a little more traditional,
for the very reason that the army has been something
separate, professional, and relatively small—a
sort of club. The military man was all the more
military because the nation was not military. Such
a man is inevitably conservative in his views,
conventional in his manners, and simplifies the
problem of patriotism to a single-eyed obedience.
When he took over the business of raising the first
levies for the present war he was confronted with
the problem of the English Trades Unions—the very
last problem in the world which one could reasonably
expect such a man to understand. And yet he did
understand it; he was perhaps the only person in
the governing class who did. If it be hard to explain[26]
to the richer classes in England, it is almost
impossible to explain to any classes in any other
country, because the English situation is largely
unique. There is the same difficulty as we have
already found in describing how vast and even violent
a transformation scene the growth of the great army
appeared; it has been almost impossible to describe
it to the chief conscript countries, which take a great
army for granted. The key to the parallel problem
of the Trades Unions is simply this—that England
is the only European country that is practically
industrial and nothing else. Trades Unions can
never play such a part in countries where the masses
live on the land; such masses always have some
status and support—yes, even if they are serfs.
The status of the English workman is not in the
earth; it is, so to speak, in the air—in a scaffolding
of artificial abstractions, a framework of rules and
rights, of verbal bargains or paper resolutions. If
he loses this, he becomes nothing so human
or homely as a slave. Rather he becomes a
wild beast, a sort of wandering vermin with no
place in the state at all. It would be necessary
to explain this, and a great deal more which
cannot possibly be explained here, before we
could measure the enormity of the enigma facing
the British official who had to propose to the English
the practical suspension of the Trades Unions. To
this must be added the fact that the Unions, already
national institutions, had just lately been in a ferment
with new and violent doctrines: Syndicalists had
invoked them as the future seats of government;[27]
historical speculators had seen in them the return to
the great Christian Guilds of the Middle Ages; a
more revolutionary Press had appeared to champion
them; gigantic strikes had split the country in every
direction. Anyone would have said that under these
circumstances the very virtues and attainments of
Kitchener would at least make it fairly certain that
he would quarrel with the Trades Unions. It soon
became apparent that the one man who was not
going to quarrel with the Trades Unions was
Kitchener. Politicians and parliamentary leaders, supposed
actually to be elected by the working classes,
were regarded, rightly or wrongly, with implacable
suspicion. The elderly and old-fashioned Anglo-Egyptian
militarist, with his doctrine and discipline
of the barrack-room and the drumhead court-martial,
was never regarded by the workers with a shade
of suspicion. They simply took him at his word,
and the leader of the most turbulent Trades Union
element paid to him after his death the simplest
tribute in the plainest and most popular language—“He
was a straight man.” I am so antiquated as
to think it a better epitaph than the fashionable
phrase about a strong man. Some silent indescribable
geniality of fairness in the man once
more prevailed against the possibility of passionate
misunderstandings, as it had prevailed against
the international nervousness of the atmosphere
of Fashoda or the tragic border feud of the
Boers. I suspect that it lay largely in the
fact that this great Englishman was sufficiently
English to guess one thing missed by many more[28]
sophisticated people—that the English Trades
Unions are very English. For good or evil, they
are national; they have very little in common
with the more international Socialism of the Continent,
and nothing whatever in common with the
pedantic Socialism of Prussia. Understanding his
countrymen by instinct, he did not make a parade
of efficiency; for the English dislike the symbols of
dictatorship much more than dictatorship. They
hate the crown and sceptre of the tyrant much more
than his tyranny. They have a national tradition
which allows of far too much inequality so long as it
is softened with a certain camaraderie, and in which
even snobs only remember the coronet of a nobleman
on condition that he shall himself seem to forget it.

The other matter is much more important.
Though the reverse of vivacious, Kitchener was
very vital; and he had one unique mark of vitality—that
he had not stopped growing. “An oak should
not be transplanted at sixty,” said the great orator
Grattan when he was transferred from the Parliament
of Dublin to the Parliament of Westminster.
Kitchener was sixty-four when he turned his face
westward to the problem of his own country. There
clung to him already all the traditional attributes of
the oak—its toughness, its angularity, its closeness
of grain and ruggedness of outline—when he was
uprooted from the Arabian sands and replanted in
the remote western island. Yet the oak not only
grew green again and put forth new leaves; it was
almost as if, as in a legend, it could put forth a new
kind of leaves. Kitchener, with all his taciturnity,[29]
really began to put forth a new order of ideas. If
a change of opinions is unusual in an elderly man,
it is almost unknown in an elderly military man.
If the hardening of time was felt even by the
poetic and emotional Grattan, it would not
have been strange if the hardening had been
quite hopeless in the rigid and reticent Kitchener.
Yet it was not hopeless; and the fact became
the spring of much of the national hope. The
grizzled martinet from India and Egypt showed
a certain power which is in nearly all great men, but
of which St. Paul has become the traditional type—the
power of being a great convert as well as a great
crusader. It is the real power of re-forming an
opinion, which is the very opposite of that mere
formlessness which we call fickleness. Nor is the
comparison to such an example as St. Paul
altogether historically disproportionate; for the point
upon which this very typical Englishman changed
his mind was a point which is now the pivot of the
whole future and perhaps of the very existence of
Christendom. For many such Englishmen it might
almost be called the discovery of Christendom. It
can be called with greater precision, and indeed with
almost complete precision, the discovery of Russia.

Military bureaucratic systems everywhere have
too much tendency to work upon one idea, and
there was a time when the military and bureaucratic
system of the British in the East worked on the
idea of the fear of Russia. It is needless here to
explain that sentiment, and useless to explain it
away. It was partly a mere tradition from the[30]
natural jingoism of the Crimean War; it was partly
in itself a tribute to the epic majesty of the Russian
march across mysterious Asia to the legendary
Chinese Wall. The point here is that it existed;
and where there exists such an idea in such
military rulers, they very seldom alter their idea.
But Kitchener did alter his idea. Not in mere
military obedience, but in genuine human reasonableness,
he came late in life to see the Russian as the
friend and the Prussian as the enemy. In the
inevitable division of British ministerial councils
about the distribution of British aid and attention
he was the one man who stood most enthusiastically,
one might say stubbornly, for the supreme importance
of munitioning the magnificent Russian defence.
He mystified all the English pessimists, in what
seemed to them the blackest hour of pessimism, by
announcing that Germany had “shot her bolt”;
that she had already lost her chance, not by any of
the Allied attacks, but by the stupendous skill and
valour of that Russian retreat, which was more
triumphant than any attack. It is this discovery that
marks an epoch; for that great deliverance was not
only the victory of Russia, but very specially the
victory of the Russians. Never before was there
such a war of men against guns—as awful and
inspiring to watch as a war of men against demons.
Perhaps the duel of a man with a modern gun is
more like that between a man and an enormous
dragon; nor is there anything on the weaker side
save the ultimate and almost metaphysical truth,
that a man can make a gun and a gun cannot make[31]
a man. It is the man—the Russian soldier and
peasant himself—who has emerged like the hero of
an epic, and who is now secure for ever from the
sophisticated scandal-mongering and the cultured
ignorance of the West.

And it is this that lends an epic and almost
primeval symbolism to the tragedy of Kitchener's end.
Somehow the very fact that it was incomplete as an
action makes it more complete as an allegory.
English in his very limitations, English in his late
emancipation from them, he was setting forth on an
eastward journey different indeed from the many
eastward journeys of his life. There are many such
noble tragedies of travel in the records of his
country; it was so, silently without a trace, that the
track of Franklin faded in the polar snows or the
track of Gordon in the desert sands. But this was
an adventure new for such adventurous men—the
finding not of strange foes but of friends yet
stranger. Many men of his blood and type—simple,
strenuous, somewhat prosaic—had threaded their way
through some dark continent to add some treasure
or territory to the English name. He was seeking
what for us his countrymen has long been a dark
continent—but which contains a much more noble
treasure. The glory of a great people, long hidden
from the English by accidents and by lies, lay before
him at his journey's end. That journey was never
ended. It remains like a mighty bridge, the
mightier for being broken, pointing across a chasm,
and promising a mightier thoroughfare between the
east and west. In that waste of seas beyond the[32]
last northern islets where his ship went down one
might fancy his spirit standing, a figure frustrated
yet prophetic and pointing to the East, whence are
the light of the world and the reunion of Christian
men.

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